dwarf*, live still in the pages of eccentric biography; and Morland, as a man, is better known than Hogarth. On the other hand, high intellectual celebrity does not always confer personal notoriety, or preserve the events of a life from oblivion. In truth, the best and happiest lives are generally the least entertaining to read. It may be regretted that quiet, useful, unostentatious virtue so seldom survives in the world's memory: but the regret is foolish and presumptuous; and I am by no means assured that the modern custom of courting fame, for qualities sufficiently rewarded by who served the mob in the double capacity of fool and dwarf. He was a foundling; picked up in the parish to which he owed his name; but no fairies took charge of him, as Charles Lamb assures us they did of Sir Thomas Gresham. He was abandoned to the muddy patronage of Trivia and Cloacina; yet he was, awhile, a great man in his way, especially at Westminster elections. Lamb, who well remembered him when "in his sear and yellow leaf" he took refuge in a hovel near Bethnal Green, has described his forlorn grimness in a paper of pathetic humour, such as Elia alone could write. *"Jeffrey Hudson, when he was about seven or eight years old, was served up in a cold pie, on the Burleigh Hill, the seat of the Duke of Buckingham, and as soon as he made his appearance, presented by the duchess to the queen, who retained him in her service. He was then but eighteen inches in height. In a masque at court, the gigantic porter, (Will Evans) drew him out of his pocket, to the surprise of all present. He is said to have grown no taller till he was thirty, when he shot up to three feet nine. Soon after the breaking out of the civil war, he was made captain in the king's army. In 1644, he attended the queen into France, where he had a quarrel with a gentleman named Crofts, whom he challenged. Mr. Crofts came to the place of appointment, armed only with a squirt. A real duel ensued, in which the antagonists came to the field on horseback, and fought with pistols; Crofts was killed at the first shot."-Dr. Hudson's History of London. If ever duellist deserved an honourable acquittal, little Jeffrey was the man. He was born at Oakham in Rutlandshire very proper that the least man should be born in the least county; and no less proper that his birth should be preceded by a comet, which was actually the case, for there was a comet in 1618, and Jeffrey was born in 1619. Like Priam, Pompey, Belisarius, Napoleon, and other sports of fortune, he exhibited in his latter years a sad contrast to the felicities of his outset. He experienced the same neglect as other faithful cavaliers of larger dimensions, was committed to the Gate-house, under suspicion of the popish plot! and died a prisoner, aged sixty-three. I believe his conveyance in the body of a bass viol, and other particulars recorded by Sir Walter Scott in his "Peveril of the Peak," to be altogether apocryphal; but there may be some ground for his addiction to alchemy and the mysteries of the Rosy Cross. The Royal Martyr had a passion for those irregularities of nature, which were once common appendages to every regal and baronial establishment. Most readers will remember Waller's pretty verses on the marriage of the dwarfs, which was negotiated by King Charles, who gave away the bride : "Design or chance makes others wive, But nature did this match contrive. Eve might as well from Adam fled, As she deny'd her little bed To him, for whom Heav'n seem'd to frame The marriage was productive: but if the king's intent was to perpetuate a miniature race, it was disappointed; for the children grew to the ordinary size. We cannot call this princely partiality for human lusus naturæ, a remnant of Gothic barbarism; the taste is classical, nay Augustan. "Habent hoc quoque deliciæ divitum; malunt quærere omnia contra naturam. Gratus est ille debilitate; ille ipsa infelicitate distorti corporis placet, aller emitur quod alieni coloris est," says Quintilian. Clemens Alexandrinus severely censures the passion of great ladies for deformed pets, upon whom they bestowed caresses for which their lovers sighed in vain, and which their husbands could not always command. Ammianus Marcellinus describes the wealthy madams of his days, attended semiviro comitatu, young and old, but generally dusky, misshapen, and ill favoured. Augustus is said by Suetonius to have disliked these waifs of nature, and shrunk from them as of ill omen. Pumilos, atque distortos, et omnes generis ejusdem ut ludibria naturæ et mali ominis abhorrebat; yet the same historian relates that he compelled a youth of good family, named Lucius, to appear on the public stage, because he was under two feet in height, and weighed but seventeen pounds, and had a prodigious voice.-L. ii. 43. We need not wonder that Domitian, at the gladiatorial games, was constantly attended by a scarlet-robed little urchin, with a preternatural small head,—puerulus coccinatus parvo portentosoque capite for the palled appetites of despotism seek for stimulation in everything monstrous and abortive. But better taste might have been expected of Charles, who was capable of appreciating the beautiful in art, and doubtless in nature also. Be it recollected that this odd sort of virtú was not without its uses in ruder ages: it procured an asylum in the houses of the affluent, for many helpless beings, who, even now, to the disgrace of our police, are incarcerated in caravans, and dragged about the country by brutal show men. "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb." peace of mind, an approving conscience, and the affectionate esteem of a worthy few, is not one of the worst symptoms of the times. Good people in a private station should be thankful if their lives are not worth writing. Public virtues exerted for public ends, the worthy issues of mighty minds, fitly aspire to publicity, and are justly rewarded with fame. "A city set on a hill cannot be hid." But the virtues of home; the hourly self-denials, so habitual as hardly to rise above the horizon of consciousness, "That best portion of a good man's life, His little daily unrecorded acts Of kindness and of love," the virtues, which, in either sex, are inherited from the mother, and consist in being rather than in doing, permit no stronger light than gleams from the fireside. They flourish best when unobserved, even by those who inhale joy and goodness from their fragrance. Of them it may truly be said,— "The principle of action once explore, That instant 'tis a principle no more." They can be understood by none, and known only to those who love the good beings whom they actuate, and by loving know them. For in the spiritual world there is no knowledge but by love. In our essential selves we neither can nor ought to be known to any but to those whom we love, and who love us. There is a worse than indelicacy in soliciting the gaze of the world by laying bare the sanctities of affection; the frailties by which we may be endeared to our kindred in blood and soul, but should neither be admired nor judged by the ignorant unsympathising multitude. It is enough if our works have no need to shun the public eye, which they ought sometimes to seek, and never to fear. Render unto Cæsar the things that be Cæsar's. But in ourselves; the very things we are, we are only God's we belong not to the world,-no, not to our own will. A good heart is a Holy of Holies, not to be profaned by unconsecrated gazers. There is no vanity so pernicious, so heart-emasculating and heart-hardening, as that of which the heart itself is the object. Better be vain of your brains, your figure, your dress, your face, your muscles, your purse, or your pedigree, than of your heart. People enamoured of their own goodness generally entertain a sneaking partiality for their bosom sins. "The pride that apes humility" produces far worse consequences than "cottages with double coach-houses;" but none more dangerous than the self-gratifying disclosure of weaknesses to which certain confessors are so prone. Now this vanity and this pride are greatly nourished by a fashionable sort of biography, which stages the minutest passages of every-day existence,-exhibits the child or the female at their prayers, in their little round of charity, in their diet and attire; and makes the death-bed itself a scene of display. The age of the great drama was neither a happy nor an innocent age. It was a time of much vice, much folly, and much trouble; but it was also an age of prodigious energy. Everything, good or evil, was on a colossal scale. The strength of will kept equipoise with the vigour of intellect. There were too many to admire themselves and others for potency in ill, not a few who sought and obtained éclat by the inventive extravagance of their absurdities,-but no one valued himself or others for petty amiabilities or amiable weaknesses. It was an age of high principle and of vehement passions, not of complacent sentimentality. Hence the minor and negative virtues, which are all that a poor man in general can display, and the trivial accidents which make up the sum of private existence, were suffered to join the vast silence of forgotten moments, without note or comment: and hence, I conclude, that of our greatest dramatic artists little has been told, because there was little to tell; little to gratify the malicious curiosity which fed on corruption; and little which the better sort considered worthy a lasting record,—though doubtless much that exercised the patience and evoked the noblest faculties of the dramatists themselves. Great part of this induction may resemble the inductions to some of our old plays, which might suit any play, being appropriate to none; but for lack of better it may serve as an apology for the very brief biographical notices which I can prefix to the present edition of the surviving works of Massinger and of Ford. For these few particulars I am indebted to Mr. Gifford. I am not aware that subsequent inquiry has added anything material to the facts which he has gathered with such commendable industry and illustrated with so much critical acumen, nor that he has been convicted of any important error. I have not access to those sources from which alone fresh intelligence can be expected, but I believe it has been sought diligently and in vain by more competent persons. Indeed, few authors of equal merit and reputation have been so little noticed by contemporaries, and none so nearly forgotten in succeeding times. Shakspeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, were always great names; and Fletcher, long after the Restoration, retained a large share of theatrical popularity. But Massinger and Ford were hardly ever acted, and hardly ever read. Even Dr. Johnson does not seem to have been aware that Rowe was beholden to Massinger for the plot of his "Fair Penitent," and the Doctor had no such partiality to the Whig Laureate as would induce him to dissemble a fact not very creditable either to the originality or the honesty of Rowe,—who must have strongly assured himself that Massinger was an unknown writer, or he would not have ventured to publish his borrowed play without a hint of acknowledgment. The long disappearance of these excellent works may be partly attributed to the want of collected editions. It does not appear that there was any entire publication of Massinger before Coxeter, or of Ford before Weber*. Those who derive pleasure or improvement from the works, will doubtless wish to be better acquainted with the men,—would have rejoiced if they had left us some touching or cheerful recollections * I never saw "Coxeter's Massinger," nor collated Monk Mason's, and have therefore neither the right nor the inclination to repeat Gifford's ever-recurrent sarcasms on their imperfections. The services of Mr. Gifford, as an editor of the text, can hardly be overrated: his arrangement of Massinger's verse, places him on a level with Porson as a master of the res metrica; his antiquarian illustrations are curious and learned, without any of that Etalage of obscure reading, which swells so many editions to an elephantiasis; and if he partook a little of his favourite Ben's acerbity of temper, much should be forgiven to a man who, I believe, had no real malice against any human being, who was neglected and maltreated at the period of life which should store up happy feelings to serve for the remainder; and who declared, in the hearing of Mr. Southey, that he never had a day of joyous health. Still, as Lord Byron, or his annotator, has well observed, it is unpleasant to take any man's prejudice for a travelling companion, be it through a country, or through a book. How can we expect forbearance, or tolerance, in disputes of politics or religion, when a disputed reading of an old play is capable of agitating the bile so furiously? Rowe, it is said, formed the plan of an edition of Massinger, but abandoned it for reasons best known to himself. That which bears the name of Coxeter, was first published in 1759, twelve years after his death, by a bookseller of the name of Dell. Coxeter, from the account of Sir Egerton Brydges, in his additions to the "Theatrum Poetarum," appears to have been a man of fortune, a diligent collector of old plays, and the first projector of Dodsley's collection. In preparing his Massinger he availed himself of some MS. notes of Oldys, which, if the statement of the antiquary be correct, he did not come over honourably by. As he did not live to complete his design, the absence of acknowledgment should not be laid at his door. "When I left London," says Oldys, "in the year 1724, to reside in Yorkshire, I left in the care of the Rev. Mr. Burridge's family, with whom I had several years lodged, amongst many other books, a copy of 'Langbaine,' in which I had written several notes and references to further the knowledge of these poets. When I returned to London in 1730, I understood my books had been dispersed, and afterwards becoming acquainted with Mr. Coxeter, I found that he had bought my 'Langbaine' of a bookseller, as he was a great collector of old plays and poetical books. This must have been of great service to him, and he has kept it so carefully from my sight that I never could have the opportunity of transcribing into this I am now writing the notes I had collected in that. Whether I had entered any remarks on Massinger, I remember not, but he had communications from me concerning him, when he was undertaking to give us a new edition of his plays, which is not published yet." This might be legal, but was hardly the part of a gentleman. I remember to have heard one that is with God, compare a plagiary from MSS. to a certain parasite that fastens to the roots of plants, and deprives them of their due nurture, while none can see the cause of their inanition. In 1761, a reprint of Coxeter's Massinger appeared, under the auspices of Thomas Davies, the biographer of Garrick, and memorialist of the stage, whose pretty wife has been very impudently mentioned by Churchill. This edition was accompanied by an Essay on the old English Dramatic Writers, by the elder Colman, addressed to Garrick. It was called "very correct," by Bishop Percy, perhaps out of pure good nature. "Monk Mason's," as Mr. Gifford says, "is little more than a servile copy of it, with all its errors." As for Weber, to the exposure of whose blunders Mr. Gifford has devoted no less than one hundred caustic pages (a better method than obtruding the vituperation at the foot of every page), he was an unfortunate German, whose name must be familiar to all readers of Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott," on account of the wonderful presence of mind displayed by Sir Walter in controlling his mania. It was certainly a presumptuous undertaking of a foreigner, not critically acquainted with our language, to become the editor of our ancient writers, and rather odd that any bookseller should select him for the purpose. But the offence is hardly worthy of a castigation severe enough for a wilful corrupter of holy writ. Poor fellow! he is gone. Requiescat in pace. of themselves,-if some relative or well-acquainted friend had done for them what so many sons, wives, and executors, have done for persons, it may be, less likely to be remembered a century hence. We would gladly overlook them at their desks, accompany them in their suburban walks, be made confidants of their loves and partakers of their friendship, have joined them with their great compeers and jovial comrades at their evening recreations, have known what manner of men they appeared to those who saw them in the body and heard them converse in plain prose like men of this world. Above all, we would fain be enabled to trace the progress of their minds, the education of their genius, the sources of their knowledge, the action of circumstance, the working of the spirit of their age, and of its wonderful proceedings on their moral and intellectual constitution. But our curiosity will never be gratified; and we ought gratefully to remember that we possess a large and noble sample of so much of their complex being as is capable of an earthly permanence: for intellect alone can put on a shape of earthly immortality, and become an everlasting and irrefragable witness of its own reality. Neither poets, nor painters, nor sculptors, nor even historians, can erect living monuments to any but themselves. The exactest copy of the fairest face, or the loveliest soul, becomes in a few years a mere ideal, only commendable as it expresses universal beauty or absolute goodness. Only the painter's or the poet's art is really perpetuated. All-but the mind-either perishes in time, or vanishes out of time into eternity. Mind alone lives on with time, and keeps pace with the march of ages. Beauty, ever fleeting and continually renewed, does its work, then drops like the petals of the blossom when the fruit is set. Valour and power may gain a lasting memory, but where are they when the brave and the mighty are departed? Their effects may remain, but they live not in them any more than the fire in the work of the potter. Piety has a real substantial immortality in heaven; its life is laid up with God, but on earth its record is but a tale that is told. But intellect really exists in its products; its kingdom is here. The beauty of the picture is an abiding concrete of the painter's vision. The Venus, the Apollo, the Laocoon, are not mere matter of history. The genius of Homer does not rest, like his disputed personal identity, on dubious testimony. It is, and will be, while the planet lasts. The body of Newton is in the grave, his soul with his Father above; but his mind is with us still. Hence may we perceive the superiority of intellect to all other gifts of earth,-its rightful subordination to the Grace that is of Heaven. PHILIP MASSINGER, the son of Arthur Massinger by a mother whose name is unknown, was born sometime in the year 1584. It does not appear that his register has been discovered; but most probably his native place was at or near Wilton, the magnificent seat of the Earls of Pembroke, to which illustrious family his father was a confidential retainer. To this fact we have the express testimony of the poet himself, in his dedication of " The Bondman," to Philip Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery: "However I could never arrive at the happiness to be made known to your Lordship, yet a desire to make a tender of all duties and service to the noble family of the Herberts descended to me from my dead father, Arthur Massinger. Many years he happily spent in the service of your honourable house, and died a servant to it, leaving his to be ever most glad and ready to be at the command of all such as derive themselves from his most honoured master, your Lordship's most noble father." We are not certified of the situation which Arthur held in the noble household, but we may be sure that it was neither menial nor mean. Service in those days was not derogatory to gentle birth. The highest characters in the state had been pages, and learned from their attendance on noble ladies no little of their chivalrous gentleness, their duteous phrase, and enthusiastic loyalty. It was no more disgrace to knight or statesman to have been a page, than to a lord mayor to have been an apprentice; and as the first municipal magistrate would never blush to acknowledge that he had closed his master's shutters, so would not a Raleigh or a Walsingham have thought shame to be reminded that they had sometime held a lady's train. And yet pages were subject to a discipline at which apprentices now-a-days would revolt; but then under-graduates were not exempt from the like: "Art thou scarce manumised from the porter's lodge, And now sworn servant to the pantoffle, And darest thou dream of marriage?" New Way to Pay Old Debts, Act I. So saith Welborn in his rags to young Allworth in his page's gay attire, manifestly reflecting on his youth alone, and not on his rank, which was more than respectable. Perhaps Massinger had some occurrence in the family of Pembroke in his recollection while writing the passage. This is a state of things that never can be reinstated. But it was good in its day, and tended to give to servitude and subordination, through all degrees, a dignity and self-respect highly favourable to good government and to rightful liberty. Too many at present regard service with feelings only proper to a land of slaves. No reciprocal duty, no natural or religious bond, is acknowledged on either side and it needs must be, that the lowly will consider that as an insult which their superiors regard as a calamity or a stain. The senatorial rank of the bishop "gentles the condition" of the poorest curate whose life is becoming of his function; the youngest ensign in a marching regiment is exalted by belonging to the profession of the Duke of Wellington. In a well-ordered state,—a state of graduated dependence and universal interdependence,-honour should flow, like the precious ointment, from the head to the skirts of the garment. But we have more direct evidence of the high estimation in which Arthur Massinger stood with his noble master, from the important mission wherewith he was intrusted. In the Sidney letters, vol. ii. p. 933, we may read,-" Master Massinger is newly come down from the Earl of Pembroke, with letters to the queen for his lordship's leave to be away from this St. George's day." The bearer of such a request to so punctilious a lady as Queen Elizabeth, must at least have been a gentleman. Of the family of Herbert*, with which the Massingers were thus honourably connected, there are *The origin of this family was Welsh. Sir William Ap Thomas of Ragland Castle was knighted for his services in the French wars by Henry V., a monarch whose affection for his native principality has been immortalized by Shakspeare, doubtless on chronicle authority: though the praises of Cambria could not be unacceptable to the Tudors, whose reputed descent from King Arthur commended their dynasty even to their Sassenach subjects, many of whom were devout believers in the prophecies of Merlin, and perhaps imagined in the accession of Henry VII. the promised resuscitation of the hero of the Round Table. Shakspeare, moreover, who passed many happy days in Wales, was evidently well inclined towards Welshmen, as the pleasant humours of Sir Hugh Evans and of Captain Fluellen, the most amiable of all his ludicrous characters, sufficiently testify. The posterity of Ap Thomas, probably from some intermarriage, took the name of Herbert. William Herbert, whom Izaac Walton calls the "Memorable," was created Earl of Pembroke by Edward IV. 1469. The peerage expired in his son Richard, whose daughter married Charles Somerset, first Earl of Worcester. Ragland Castle must have gone with her, for it was a Somerset and a Worcester who defended that fortress, the last that held out in the King's cause, with such heroic loyalty. From Ewyas, a natural son of William the first Earl of Pembroke, came Sir William, in whom the peerage was restored. "He was in 1552 commissioned to view the fortifications of Berwick; and on the 17th of February, 1552-3, he rode into London to his mansion of Baynard Castle with three hundred horse in his retinue, of which one hundred of them were gentlemen in plain blue cloth with chains of gold and badges of a dragon on their sleeves." Debrett, to whom I owe what little of heraldic lore I possess, has not told us from what chronicler he borrows this piece of history, but it smacks of old Stowe, and is curiously illustrative of the manners of that time. It may be as well to observe that a wivern vert is the Pembroke crest. Earl William married Anne, daughter of Lord Parr of Kendal, and sister to Queen Catherine Parr, by whom he had issue two sons. The elder, Henry, the patron of Arthur Massinger, succeeded his father as Earl of Pembroke, and sat on the trials of Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, 1571, and on that of Mary, 1586. He was thrice married. His third wife was the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, to whose request we owe the Arcadia, which wears her name as a favour; on whom Ben Jonson wrote the famous epitaph "Underneath this sable hearse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother: An epitaph, which though happily turned, is too hyperbolical, too clever, and too conceited to be inscribed on a Christian's tomb. The sweet and brotherly dedication to the Arcadia does this great lady far more honour than Jonson's tomb epigram. Of all the writers of that true age of chivalrous courtship. Daniel best knew how to address himself to female greatness. He was in earnest, and could do honour to the rank without adulation; to the sex, without usurping the language either of love or of devotion. His epistles to the Countess of Cumberland, to the Countess of Bedford, and to the Lady Anne Clifford (whose preceptor he was) are among the finest moral poems in the world. His dedication of Cleopatra to the Countess of Pembroke is not so good. The most interesting part of it is the stanza |